Have you considered upgrading to stumpwm by the same author? It has all the features ratpoison does plus support for floating layout via gnew-float, among othe

Have you considered upgrading to stumpwm by the same author? It has all the features ratpoison does plus support for floating layout via gnew-float, among other things. And it's written in Common Lisp, so you can hack/customize/extend it as easily as [if not more so than] emacs.